“Love is fragile but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
January 2012
49 posts
“We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”
—Mother Teresa
“I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.”
—Andrew Sullivan, This I Believe
“Travel is intensified living … and one of the last great sources of legal adventure.”
—Rick Steves
“Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance toward the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point. Climb slowly, steadily, enjoying each passing moment; and the view from the summit will serve as a fitting climax for the journey.”
—Harold V. Melchert
“Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
—Gian-Carlo Rota
“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”
—Margaret Atwood
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
—Martin Buber
“You know the phrase: hope is not a plan. But hope is, in our line of work, a necessary ingredient and sometimes the ‘secret sauce’.”
—Paul Farmer
“Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.”
—Rilke, excerpt from a letter to Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925
“There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”
—Nelson Mandela
“In the summer
I stretch out on the shore
And think of you. Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.” —Nizar Qabbani
I stretch out on the shore
And think of you. Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.” —Nizar Qabbani
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”
—Albert Ellis
“So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.”
—Roald Dahl
“I wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
“Believe with all of your heart that you will do what you were made to do.”
—Orison Swett Marden
“When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.”
—Buddha
“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.”
—Janet Fitch, White Oleander
“Little by little, one travels far.”
— J. R. R. Tolkien
“Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.”
—Neil Gaiman
